Transcript of Pat Gelsinger's keynote at VMworld 2014 (abridged)

Transcript of Pat Gelsinger's keynote at VMworld 2014 (abridged)

Good morning and welcome the San Francisco. Welcome to VMworld 2014, I’m excited be here for my third VMworld. This is the pinnacle of the year for VMware, the pinnacle of year for our partners at VMware and for me personally, this is a very unique event because on the stage exactly 2 years ago I took the baton of leadership for this great company and this great community of partners

So let’s start by taking a look at world we live in today. The world that we’re increasingly participating in is a liquid world where we see these old rigid structures give way. In this dynamic shape shifting environment, old ways are giving way to new ways and maybe we can start talking about this by water as an analogy where water covers 70% of the surface of the earth today. Water is the basic source of life. It creates energy. And at the same time, is powerfully destructive and it can be powerful, beautiful and magical all at the same time.

We see that water takes on these many forms and changes shape constantly; adaptive, flowing and moving and we’re seeing that today's world is becoming increasingly liquid as well. We’re seeing that education is no longer the classroom, but extends it extends to wherever you are. Work is no longer physical place, but it's what you do. Retail is mobile and transactions are happening everywhere that you are; transportation is being redefined with electric cars and self driven cars, currency redefined by categories like bit coin; entertainment, the poster child of digital transformation and we’re seeing that throughout our world today is becoming more liquid than ever before.

We are seeing the some of our best customers at the forefront of these changes within their own respective industries like MetroHealth who is pioneering a more fluid and patient-centric model for healthcare and getting broad accolades from the industry for that work. We are seeing cancer research in the United Kingdom, where it's a combination of multiple research institutes, forming a nonprofit to drive a new model for cancer and be able to drive early detection on a global scale. We see that customers like the Ministry of Education in Malaysia redefining how they reach to the broad and diverse communities that they have, bringing up 1,200 schools in less than five months and being able to reach into the deepest parts of Borneo jungle and offer those students through VU and VDI the first experience to participate in a connected world.

Others like Revlon had a major fire at their Venezuela operation and within three hours, they were able to DR and have the site and factory running for those products in New Jersey – incredible.

[…]

These are some of the heroes that we’re seeing of a liquid business world that we’re moving into.

And the characteristics of this ‘then and now’, as we go into liquid business, are significant, dramatic. We are seeing that assets - I used to have to control them all. Today, how can I leverage your assets and use them in powerful ways? A company like Uber, has a market cap that is now equal to that of Hertz and Avis combined and they don’t own any assets. We’re seeing that innovation is now the speed of rapid innovation and fail fast. App deployment that used to take months or years can now be automated and instant and Jim Collins’ favored, famous book ‘Built to Last’. Sorry Jim – it’s time to write a new one. It's now ‘Built to Change’. How fast can you have organizations move in this liquid world?

And in the shape shifting environment, the biggest risk to success is perpetuating the status quo. Successful business leaders understand that change is inevitable, that disruption is inevitable and as the Xerox researcher Alan Kay said ‘The best way to predict the future is invent it’. This is what brave leaders need to do to today. They need to be thoughtful, decisive, bold. The brave will thrive in this world.

At Intel we had a phrase called ‘informed risk taking’. Not being foolish and just running out and trying things but being thoughtful, being decisive, calculated, risk considered, decision-making. This is the world where the brave will thrive.

I quite like this definition of bravery – two aspects of this; decisive in the face of uncertainty. You never know everything for sure and bold and pursuit of new opportunity. Maybe this is like two sides of the same coin.

In our own lives, we know that bravery is part of what it is to be human.

[…]

I’m okay – we’re good. But being able to face into those situations - life is defined by the sequence of brave acts that we take. We see those brave acts in business as well; someone like Elon Musk - in the midst of financial crisis at Tesla, he mortgages all of the assets that he had been able to amass with PayPal and apply them to keeping Tesla afloat. Today Tesla is doing well, but his vision is much bigger than just building a car company for electric vehicles. It's about changing transportation in a carbon friendly way to literally address climate change from the efforts of the businesses that he is driving.

Another brave business leader you might not be as familiar with is Anne Wojcicki of 23andMe. She's democratizing access to your own genetic makeup. When Steve Jobs has his DNA mapped in his fight against cancer it cost $100,000. 23andMe is cutting that to $99, enabling 250 DNA markers for disease carrying status and responses to different drugs. A bold undertaking to drive a fundamental shift in the entire healthcare industry - to a preventative model.

Bravery in business - consider a bold undertaking that we just celebrated - the landing on the Moon, 45 years ago this summer. An incredible example of bravery and science and technology and reaching out into the stars and into our galaxies. Neil Armstrong taking that one small step and a giant leap for mankind, but the truth is Armstrong had an army of world-class engineers standing behind him. He trusted the systems and processes that were put in place because, you see, bravery is seldom a solo act.

At VMware we are going through our own brave journey. Two years now, as CEO; two years since I've joined your community, the people, the teams that you represent and when I think about bravery, I’m talking about you, I’m talking about us, I’m talking about my team and the company and every person and family that participates with us. And when I think about that bravery, I think about our 17,000 employees and I represent those 6000 engineers who are developing, overseeing and driving the innovations of the most important piece of software that has ever been delivered for infrastructure. Over 80% of the world’s applications run through that piece of software. Everything from nuclear reactor control systems to iPod software for kindergarten classes. Every day, I challenge this group of engineers to disrupt, to transform, to deliver, to innovate and enable value for our customers in new and powerful ways.

And it’s important for everyone in this room and everyone in the community to understand that I will hold VMware accountable to be brave, to push forward and disrupt for the benefit of our customers; and in the turn, you can count on us to lead the way in this generation of brave new IT.

And as each of you practice brave IT in your companies and environments, so must we - we have a CIO whose name is Tony Scott. Tony stand up here. And Tony, like you, has taken the brave IT commitment and at VMware, when we brought Tony in place, we use our own products just like any of the high-tech companies. I had a European customers is not eating your own dog food, its drinking your own champagne. Well, we decided dog food more appropriate so we now have ‘extreme dog fooding’ and Tony's in charge of that for us. And a couple of examples of that: Our SAP ERP financials that we are in the process of moving – we are going to do that directly onto vCloud Air. We are going operate our most mission-critical workload directly on our cloud. We’re embracing BYOD in this liquid world where personal and business can't see where one ends and the other begins.

We’re aggressively rolling out AirWatch, as our mobile platform. Our new facility in Hyderabad, India is being built from a COTS environment with NSX as the foundational technology for that entire infrastructure and we are driving all of VMware IT to be IT -s-a-service with things like hardware layouts-as-a-service,

It’s not just what we're doing, but we also have some brave IT leaders here in the room. […]

Each one of you has the opportunity. This is your moment; your businesses your firms, your business leaders, are looking to you to lead the way. Against this, we challenge you to go bravely. It’s about charting the smart path forward with a sensible plan and our job at VMware and with our partners is - we've got your back. We are here delivering you the tools to go forward bravely into the world of new brave IT.

But what silos do you need to overcome? What are the challenges that limit you from moving forward in this way? We see that there’s a set of silos that are set up as ‘or’s’. I can do traditional apps or cloud native apps. I could satisfy IT or I could satisfy developers. I could be on premise or I could be off premise. I could have fast instant environments or I could be safe, secure and compliant.

Our approach at VMware is the bridge between these two worlds. We believe we have the unique power to be the ‘and’ across these divides. We allow you to have safe, secure and instant and elastic scale. Moving from the tyranny of the or to the power of the and. And this is what we think of as brave new IT. It's the power of the and - the simple strategy about bridging these two worlds, but it also means letting go of things from the past. That hardware-defined data center is comfortable but expensive, slow, brittle, manual. We have to leave that behind.

The future is about brave new IT and three core characteristics of this environment are fluid, instant and choice. These three form the basis of the three strategies for VMware. The software defined data center, the hybrid cloud and end-user computing. A year and a half ago, we laid out this vision of these three components of our strategy and since then we have been diligently executing upon all three of them. It's gone from vision to instantiation and now powerful realization across all three of them. These three together is the path to the software defined enterprise. We’re very proud of the progress that we've made here - much yet to do, but we are on a journey to execute the software-defined enterprise, building on these three components.

Let’s look at each one a little bit more carefully as we have some exciting announcements today; first the foundation of the software defined enterprise; - virtualise everything with VSphere as the foundational technology. Virtualise next, the network and NSX, and we will talk more about the power and momentum we are seeing there. Transforming storage - aligning it with applications, Virtual SAN and Virtual Volumes, delivered a powerful way.

And management - all things need to give way to automation and that is done through this layer of management so we’ll look at some exciting announcements against each one of these areas.

First we’re announcing vCloud Suite 5.8 and fundamentally when we announced vCloud suite, the reality was it was mostly packaging and bundling and now we are engineering it as a suite with fit, finished integration for increased ease-of-use and new use cases, and policy driven capabilities. We are also in beta with vSphere 6.0, the next major release that continues to improve our scale up.

[…]

We’re in VSAN 2.0 beta as well. Great, amazing, adoption and momentum with that. We are also as part of vSphere 6.0, releasing VVOL. Before this, when we announced VSAN, I apologized to you, our industry partners, particularly in the storage area. Because one of our thesis’s of disruptive innovation is always enabling the ecosystem to come along. And VSAN did not enable you to do that. VVOL does and we’re committed to delivering this to participate in the software automation and policy management of that platform - as we continue to innovate on VSAN and the integrated technology that comes as part of vSphere 6.

We are also releasing a rebranding and an integration of our full management suite. The vRealise suite for automation operations and business, into a single offering as well. The core innovation engine at VMware is alive and well.

When we present the software defined data center to customers, the sales cycle takes minutes; the customer gets it immediately and then they say, how can I do it? And the implementation cycle. well that’s a little bit harder. And what we found was found is that there's three different approaches to instantiating the software defined data center for customers. One is sort of the build your own; I’ve got this infrastructure to build and operate SDDC.

The second is a much faster route with converged infrastructure; things like the VCE vBlock is a powerful way to bundle will deliver more rapidly into the customer's environment.

Today I'm excited to announce hyper converged infrastructure with all components now available of the software defined data center and the powerful common building block of the x86 servers, we can deliver a dramatically simpler hyper converged infrastructure solution. With that today is my pleasure to announce VMware EVO.

EVO, the next evolution of infrastructure. VMware EVO is a family of products that is a simple integrated solution - that is the fastest way to deploy an SDDC. EVO is essentially the SDDC packaged with hardware into a single, easy-to-use solution.

As I said, EVO is the bundling of hardware and software delivered through our OEM partners; we’re taking the power of the SDDC, working with our hardware partners and making it available as a complete, integrated solution.

Today we’re announcing the first member of the EVO family of products and that's EVO:RAIL.

EVO:RAIL is an appliance solution for midrange needs that offers dramatic simplification from power on to VMs in 15 minutes or less […] EVO:RAIL, roll it up, take it out-of-the-box, 15 minutes – VM operational. Stunning delivery for the software defined data center.

Today we’re announcing this in conjunction with these six hardware partners. We have EVO:RAIL right? This is not a VMware product. We enable our OEMs to deliver. We're not doing hardware, our OEM partners deliver this as a solution.

[…]

All of these together were committed as partners for us and EVO:RAIL

And if you go to the show floor, you will find the EVO Zone, where you’ll see the first instantiations of the EVO appliances there on the show floor. I encourage you to look at its exciting new capabilities and talk to each of our partners who are bringing these products to market. We’re excited – the fastest way to deliver the software defined data center -EVO:RAIL.

But wait, there is more. I said it was a family. So we’ve got EVO:RAIL, what else is in the family? The second member is EVO:RACK. We’re doing a tech preview of EVO:RACK here at VMworld. It’s the power and the same concepts of EVO but done at cloud scale. Where we can scale out an entire data center; a cloud SDDC environment in two hours or less. With that scale of racks, automating the lifecycle management of the environment, just like EVO:RAIL, working with a range of hardware partners for preconfigured racks scale solutions with today's leading hardware partners, as well as converged infrastructure binding, such as with the VCE and Vblocks as well, the leading CI partners as well - a range of hardware solutions.

Exciting - delivering SDDC at cloud scale. Another component of our strategy here is making these technologies broadly available to the industry. Today, we’re joining OCP, the open compute project. We expect that EVO:RACK will be available in OCP compliant hardware and were making code contributions of the low-level management technology, to make it broadly available to the industry through OCP as open source contributions as well.

More choice, more partners, as we progress toward making SDDC available at scale. Why do we do infrastructure? Infrastructure is not an end to itself. It's an end to applications – it’s all about running apps and today we have is changing app landscape that says: ‘some believe that I need a new silo of infrastructure to run third-generation apps’. A new silo of infrastructure? No! That's the problem that virtualization is out to solve in the first place, right? No hardware silos! So today we're going to disprove that myth as well and we’re going to offer more choice and that begins with an exciting announcement of OpenStack. Today were announcing VMware integrated OpenStack. An OpenStack distribution by VMware available in beta today. Developers who want to programmatically consume infrastructure through the OpenStack APIs can now do it using the best ingredients on earth from VMware; a complete VMware solution that adds to it the OpenStack interfaces. You don't need separate infrastructure to have third-generation OpenStack apps. This picture sort of presents that fully; all components of the software defined data center, OpenStack bindings, delivery VMware APIs, as well as OpenStack APIs. You could quickly deliver developer friendly, OpenStack, quickly standup ` complete OpenStack cloud directly on your existing VMware infrastructure. You infrastructure and IT guys can be best friends with your OpenStack developer guys without changing a thing. It is choice without disruption.

Start the conversation

0 comments

Register

I agree to TechTarget’s Terms of Use, Privacy Policy, and the transfer of my information to the United States for processing to provide me with relevant information as described in our Privacy Policy.

Please check the box if you want to proceed.

I agree to my information being processed by TechTarget and its Partners to contact me via phone, email, or other means regarding information relevant to my professional interests. I may unsubscribe at any time.